Shooting RAW is a waste of time

[SamSpade1941]

Others have already covered this so there is no need for me to beat a dead horse but shooting jpeg on a DSLR is silly IMO, if you want decent quality photographs. Everything I do is not great work but I strive for it and shooting RAW allows you to recover details you might not be able to if you shoot and process only JPEG. Thats a fact.

 

[Horoscope Fish]

An 8-bit .jpg can address 256 levels of luminance per color channel, or 16.7 million colors total. A "low-end" 12-bit RAW file can address 4,096 levels of luminance per color channel, or 68.7 billion colors in total. I used the phrase "low end" previously because even my D5100 shoots 14-bit color which registers four times as many values as 12-bit color does (or, about 275 billion). Now, if someone thinks a format that tosses away that much color rendition and tonality (easily four-thousand times as much tonality) irrevocably, is just the greatest thing to come along since the invention of the lens pen, then we'll simply have to agree to disagree.

 

[AC016]

Okay boys, the horse is dead. horse meat is going for what, 0.56 cents a pound? (God, i am sure someone will come along in their infinite wisdom and correct me). Therefore, let me drag the carcass off to the butchers and make some money. Can put it towards a new lens

 

[crycocyon]

Exactly. This guy starts a thread without offering anything apart from a single practical consideration as to why shooting raw is a waste of time. It is the kind of statement that would come from an amateur trying to get through as many photos as possible, not a seasoned professional. Horoscope fish covered the bit depth loss well, but I'll just summarize that RAW is an uncompressed format, jpeg a compressed format. Your camera performs a certain level of compression (a certain percentage) and in the process of compressing, information is lost, both in terms of color and in terms of resolution because when you compress, you have to process the noise as well and how the processing algorithm in the camera deals with each pixel is going to be camera-specific. Have you ever heard of batch processing? You can take raw files and run them through a batch process to perform basic tonal changes, color correction, etc. and then convert as a batch to jpeg but then how many of the 1000s of photos actually go to the married couple? All? Do you not edit them. or choose the best ones to create a package for the bridge and groom? It seems to me that all you care about is quantity (of weddings, of photos) rather than quality. You have no regard for preserving the moments of the weddings you photograph in the way in which they should be preserved....uncompressed and ready to be worked on not just today, but on any kind of software in the future because the technology will change in terms of processing, but the raw file will not (apart from pixel resolution). And then to come on this forum and say categorically that shooting raw is a waste of time offers nothing in the way of practical, technical, or even rational help to anyone. If I choose to shoot raw, then it is for no one to say it is a waste of time. I would say that shooting jpeg for weddings does a disservice to the wedding couple and is a waste of their money, because they cannot do anything with those images in the future to improve them if they wanted to.

 

[pistnbroke]

All good and all true but how may levels of luminance can the eye detect? How many can be printed ? how many show on a computer screen? 256 or 4000?

Tell me if I am wrong but when we lightroom our large/basic optimal compression jpegs ... say 3mb and we come to save them we set max to 5mb so when saved are not furthur compressed ....did we degrade the image ??

 

[Rexer John]

All good and all true but how may levels of luminance can the eye detect? How many can be printed ? how many show on a computer screen? 256 or 4000?

Tell me if I am wrong but when we lightroom our large/basic optimal compression jpegs ... say 3mb and we come to save them we set max to 5mb so when saved are not furthur compressed ....did we degrade the image ??

The only one that really matters, is the print.
When using JPEG, we sometimes need to recover "lost" highlights or shadows, (I put lost in quotes because when we say lost we generally mean barely recognisable. Blown being actually lost highlights)

In a Jpeg, we can recover some "lost" detail but the recovered area is of questionable quality, even with a quality JPEG, and if the area is changing colour or luminance gradually it is likely to suffer banding or posterization.
With Raw we have so many more levels that we don't suffer the same fate, smooth and silky gradients with much heavier adjustments than a JPEG can take.

Print both the modified JPEG (not talking about lightly modified here) and modified Raw saved as a Jpeg. so now both images have the same 256 levels.
The Raw edited version looks like the photo came straight from the camera. The Jpeg has clearly suffered.

With very little or no "lost" details in the original, the photos will look great whether originally shot as JPEG or Raw.

If you can nail exposure every time without going over or under in the same photo (not always possible even for a pro)
Use reflectors or flashes for the shadowed side of your subjects.
Nail white balance under varied lighting every time.
You don't need Raw.

For anyone human and using a camera that simply cannot cope with the dynamic range of our real world, either use Raw or accept the lower quality photos you will end up with in print, when the photo is not one to use straight out of the box.

 

[jdeg]

I think we covered everything!